Good to see one of the folks from Aztec Music are back from their legal/financial woes and up and running again with a new label, Sandman.
For a few years there Aztec were producing some incredible reissues of long out of print Australian albums from the '60s to the '80s with faultless packaging and sound.
This reissue combines Madder Lake's two LPs, "Stillpoint" (1973) and "Butterfly Farm" (1974), plus the non album singles plus tracks recorded at the Sunbury music festival.
Now ... as much as I dig a lot of Aussie '70s prog these guys were just not my cup of herb tea.
Despite the decent musicianship there is some magic missing in the production and arrangements.
The songs are mostly long keyboard and guitar based epics with a vocalist in the early Joe Cocker/blues shouter vein...a good dose of mind altering substances these guys may of come up with something your average I-94 Bar punter could sink their teeth into like other Australian bands who were around the same time (i.e. Buffalo, Khavas Jute, Blackfeather, Tamam Shud etc.) ""
Sadly, these songs plod along with little power amd a lot of repetition.
There is a very vague Blue Oyster Cult-ish sound in some tracks (especially the intro to "Helper") however they lack BOC's Satanic power stance and lyrical genius to make the tunes work. Some songs the band tries to boogie...or get funky...but comes across a tad flat due to a lack of interesting band interplay.
Nevertheless, if you're a fan already you will shit yourself over the remastering and packaging.
